In one form, cryptography is the art and science of preparing, transmitting and reading messages in a form intended to prevent the message from being read by those not privy to secrets associated with the form. Cryptography is practiced in and widely appreciated for a wide array of applications, including gaming, computer security, healthcare information security, banking information security, military communications, mathematics, intellectual property protection and many others.
In the past, such prior art cryptography techniques encrypted data to make the data difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt. Such techniques were designed to prevent unauthorized review and/or use of the data by third parties. While such prior art cryptography techniques can, in fact, be very difficult to attack and bypass, such techniques remain vulnerable to attacks for several reasons.
Many prior art cryptography techniques use only a single data block or segment length when encrypting the data. Accordingly, a discernible pattern can be detected and such patterns aid in attacking and bypassing the benefits associated with using such cryptographic techniques. Still further, many prior art cryptography techniques use only a single key to encode all of the data. Accordingly, the use of a single key applied to all blocks or segments of data similarly provides the basis for finding a pattern that can be used to attack such cryptographic techniques.
Presently, the use of electronic data and other information has become an integral part of daily life. Each day, more and more emails, electronic documents, personal information and other forms of electronic data are transmitted throughout the world by businesses and individuals alike. Accordingly, the need to secure such data from unauthorized use and viewing has also increased.
In another form, cryptography is used to implement authentication and verification paradigms. For example, using strong passwords and other cryptographic techniques, a user and/or data can be verified or authenticated. Such authentication provides an enhanced level of trust and security.
Nevertheless, many security problems today arise from the use of weak passwords. By way of example, password creation and usage is dictated by the limited ability of the human mind to remember and/or associate a textual sequence with a given scenario. Accordingly, various stratagems have arisen to compensate for this limitation, such as using associated images with websites, requiring physical gestures, memory mnemonics; sound clips, ‘captchas’, and the like. However, a key generated by using only one of such resources in its entirety (for example, a specific physical gesture or a specific image) can make such key generation vulnerable from a security point of view; since an intelligent guess of such specific image, physical gesture or the like, by an unauthorized person can be sufficient to compromise the valuable information and/or authenticity of the user protected by such key.
Accordingly, there has been a long felt need for a new, improved, robust yet, user friendly cryptographic key generation technique that can defeat well-known attacks on key generation methodologies. The currently disclosed technology readily satisfies this and other needs.